Promotional Information

Writing the Hamat̓sa critically surveys more than two centuries worth of published, archival, and oral sources to trace the attempted prohibition, intercultural mediation, and ultimate survival of one of Canada’s most iconic Indigenous ceremonies.

Table of Contents

Foreword / Chief William Cranmer/T̓łlakwagila (ꞌNa̱mg̱is Nation)

Prologue: Points of Arrival and Departure

Introduction: From Writing Culture to the Intercultural History of Ethnography

1 A Complex Cannibal: Colonialism, Modernity and the Hamat̓sa

2 Discursive Cannibals:The Textual Dynamics of Settler Colonialism, 1786–1893

3 The Foundations of All Future Researches: The Work of Franz Boas and George Hunt, 1886–1966

4 Reading, Rewriting, and Writing Against: Changing Anthropological Theory, 1896–1997

5 From Index to Icon: (Auto)Biography and Popular Culture, 1941–2012

6 Reading Culture, Consuming Ethnography

Afterword: Between This World and That / Andy Everson/Tanis (K̕ómoks Nation)

Appendices

Glossary

Notes; References; Index

About the Author

Aaron Glass is an associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center, New York City. He is co-author, with Aldona Jonaitis, of The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History; editor of Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast; and co-editor, wiht Brad Evans, of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema. His documentary films include In Search of the Hamat̓sa: A Tale of Headhunting.

Reviews

…stands as a kind of history of anthropology…
*JACANZS Vol. 3*

"Glass’s work is thorough, thoughtful, and unequivocal in its critique of previous textual treatments of the Hamat̓sa"
*BC Studies*

Aaron Glass has produced an important book.
*Tony Kail, Anthropology Book Forum*